The present invention relates to a recipe parameter management system and a recipe parameter management method for use with the same for managing recipe parameters of a review system to observe a surface of a planar substrate such as a semiconductor wafer.
Foreign matters and defects taking place in a circuit pattern formed on a wafer surface in semiconductor manufacturing processes cause defects in the semiconductor products such as integrated circuits manufactured through the semiconductor manufacturing processes. To cope with the difficulty, whether or not a problem takes place in the manufacturing processes is continuously monitored by quantifying the state of occurrence of foreign matter and circuit pattern defects (to be referred to as wafer pattern defects hereinbelow) in a semiconductor manufacturing line. Also, by precisely observing the contour of a wafer pattern defect, whether or not the defect fatally affects the semiconductor product is also confirmed.
Conventionally, such defects have been visually observed by a human. Recently, by using apparatuses such as Automatic Defect Review (ADR) and Automatic Defect Classification (ADC) based on the image processing techniques employing a computer, it is possible to automatically determine the size, the contour, and the kind of the defects (reference is to be made to, for example, JP-A-2007-40910 and JP-A-2007-184565).
Since a large amount of defect data items can be obtained in a short period of time due to such automatizing functions, it is possible to efficiently narrow a range of, for example, the cause of defects. However, if the defect under consideration is a defect which fatally affects yield of the products, it is inevitable to rely on the visual inspection by a human in the final stage of confirmation of the defect. Hence, there still remain chances in which an engineer or operator observes defects by a review system and chances in which an engineer or operator checks images of defects automatically created by the review system.
On the other hand, in the review system, sensors are improved in their performance such as sensitivity thereof and various functions become increasingly complicated. As a result, load imposed on the engineer or the operator who operates the review system is not mitigated, but rather increased. To reduce the load, for example, JP-A-2006-173589 describes an example in which by effectively employing the Graphical User Interface (GUI), operability is improved in the operations ranging from the defect observation to the image collation which are repeatedly carried out in the defect analysis.